


school reunion

by loupettes



Series: just the bits in-between [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s02e03 School Reunion, F/M, Flirting, Fluff, Longing, Missing Scene, Regret, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-14 19:29:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28676001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loupettes/pseuds/loupettes
Summary: Part three of thejust the bits in-between series:a collection of missing scenes taking place between or during each episode of series 2.school reunion.Split into two chapters: chapter one takes place the morning of, chapter two takes place in the evening following their trip to Deffry Vale High. [COMPLETE]
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Series: just the bits in-between [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2095053
Comments: 32
Kudos: 48





	1. Part one

He yawned as he waited for the water to fill the kettle, flicking the tap off and putting the kettle down with a much louder thud than he'd anticipated. He grabbed two mugs - wait, what time is it? _Seven!_ Oh, definitely just one mug, then - and put it down, chucking a teabag in and reaching for the milk in the fridge, groaning as his muscles stretched following their night of rest. Which was quite rare for him; he didn't often feel the need for 'a night's sleep', at least by human standards, but he found himself stuck in a routine that wasn't his and it seemed unexpectedly practical to adhere to it nonetheless. The toast popped up, he spread his jam in its plenty and marvelled in anticipation at a rather splendid looking cuppa. 

Settling himself down at the table, he savoured every moment of jammy goodness before he began sipping away at his tea, his eyes closed as he enjoyed the quiet hum of the TARDIS in the wake of a new day. Well, as days go on a ship hovering in the vortex of time, which ironically were determined by a human and her need for sleep and _not_ the Time Lord and his impeccable grasp on the concept. He kept an eye on it, though, because he had a feeling the lazy bugger lied to him on several occasions about having only slept 8 hours when his internal and fairly accurate sense of time seemed to suggest the number was closer to 11. 

He felt a mental poke, a distance understanding that the TARDIS was reminding him that he was, once again, not more than 30 minutes into wakefulness, daydreaming about his companion. 

This was getting a bit out of hand, wasn’t it? Well, it _definitely_ got out of hand the other night, he can safely admit to that. His memory dared filter back to the feeling of having her underneath him, legs twisted with his, delightful pink speckled cheeks, plump lips a delicious gateway to her restrained moans and laboured breaths, her hair a soft mess sticking to parts her face that he wanted so desperately to fix for her, pull it back to give him more surface to pepper his lips to the warmth of her skin, flushed as it was, devouring her every inch and every taste if it weren’t for his left hand on blue and right hand on yellow in their particularly audacious game of _Twister_. Considering the TARDIS liked to keep him in check and remind him when things... well, needed to be stopped, she sure did enjoy amping up the temperature to result in a certain pink little rascal removing the odd little item of clothing, particularly gruelling nights where beads of sweat would trickle from her chest south, the - 

Give it time, he hushed himself -

 _\- Give it time?!_ Give it bloody _nothing_ you sick old git, she is _human!_

But the problem was he’d decided quite early on that it was fruitless to try to maintain distance from her, and quite shortly after that he’d decided it was only a matter of time before he hitched one of those terribly short skirts of hers up and -

_Crossword. Now._

He picked up his empty cup of tea and busied himself with making another, settling back down a few moments later with a puzzle and his fresh cup of tea. He flipped the pages open and noted a few had been completed, and not on his watch. He landed on a page and was _horrified_ to find she’d completed the crossword in pen. Ink! _Permanent ink!_ Christ, he could murder her sometimes. No, Rose: 4 down is not _‘hypocrisy’._ He sighed, flipping through the rest of the puzzles defeatedly before spotting she’d left at least one for him to do, so he settled in nicely and took to the clues.

Crosswords were getting harder these days. He didn’t know what it was, but he could only hope it was the TARDIS picking out the more difficult ones for him to keep his mind sharp. Which was silly, because he definitely didn’t need to keep his mind sharp. Brilliant mind, the sharpest. It only made him look or the more foolish when he and Rose would get through them together and there’d be words he _wouldn’t_ know. And she would tease him endlessly about it. 

A few minutes later, the devil herself entered the kitchen. One of his old jumpers she often slept in engulfed her upper half and his gaze lingering a little too long on the path from her pyjama shorts down the bare skin to her long woolly socks halfway up her calf - _his_ socks now! What was the little minx up to these days, wandering about in _his_ clothes and apparently losing items of her own in the process?

He focused all of his frustration on the act of gently placing pen to paper.

“Morning.” He released the last of his tension through an exhale and made some attempt to draw her gaze from her phone. She grunted her reply, and he hadn’t quite worked out whether she wasn’t listening to him or she still hadn’t woken up yet. 

Both. Probably both. 

_“‘Morning, Doctor. Lovely sleep, how was yours?’,_ very well, thank you, Rose, so kind of you to ask.”

“You’re welcome.” She yawned her reply, as she pulled out a chair opposite him and slumped herself down. Without taking her eyes off her phone, she reached for his tea.

“Oi!” He slapped her hand but she remained unfazed, bringing the mug to her lips to take a sip. She recoiled in disgust. 

“Ugh, sugar.”

“That’s cos it’s mine!”

“Was. S’mine now.”

“You don’t even _like_ sugar!”

She nodded, taking another sip and pulling a face of distaste. “You’re right, but I like tea. And there’s some of that in here.”

He scowled, regrettably pushing himself from the table to put the kettle on once more. He made an effort to make his actions heard; slamming the mug down on the counter and making audible sighs of frustration as he spun the teabag around vigorously. He had half a mind to dollop a few sugars in this one too, but he knew it would only result in him making another shortly after. He placed it down on the table next to her and she held his now _empty_ cup up to him. If she wasn’t so bloody adorable and quite the handy companion to keep around, he’d have kicked her off this ship a _long_ time ago. 

“Ta.”

He grunted, ripping the cup out of her hand. Not quite yet ready to resign himself to the title of TARDIS barista, he made them a pot instead. When he finally joined her, she’d put her phone face down on the table. 

She smiled. “Hello.”

“Too late, now.”

“Fair enough. I’m sorry, and thank you for the tea.”

“You’re lucky I know already that you’re a little shit in the mornings. Fortunately for you, the pros are still outweighing the cons. _Just_.”

“Ooh,” she grinned. “That’s good. Thought when I stained some of your new white shirts pink in the wash I’d have lost a few too many points on that pro list.”

“Oh, you did,” he sipped his tea and she nodded, “but later that day you somehow solved the riddle of that boy’s age and subsequently saved our lives so can’t say I couldn’t forgive you.”

“GCSE linear equations with Mr. Murray,” she mused and her lips curled in a reminiscent smile. “He was so fit. He once said I was one of the funniest students he’d ever taught. Mind you, he’d only been there a year by the time I had maths with him, but it was the only class I had 100% attendance in.”

He blinked, and lowered his gaze to her fingers, gently circling the rim of her cup. He knew by now when Rose was lost in thought, so he allowed himself the same courtesy: to submerge himself in his own daydreams. The delicateness of her fingers; the way the pad of her index finger must have been barely sensitive to the china on which it graced; how her other fingers had a sweet curl to them, frozen in place apart from her middle finger, which would occasionally switch places to do the tracing. He imagined what those fingers, using that amount of pressure, would feel like on his own skin as she traced lines, softly circulating the ball of his shoulder as his arm draped around her waist, waking up to her in bed rather than seeing her for the first time in a morning so far across the breakfast table, breathing her in, blanketed in the warmth of her skin, so soft as she lay with the early sunrise casting its golden glow on her. 

“Speaking of,” she interrupted, taking another sip of her tea. “Mickey called."

“Course he did.” It took all of his might to not only be pulled away from such a dream he felt entirely encompassed in a sense of comfort and _home,_ but to be reminded about Mickey Smith. Truth be told, he had completely forgotten about the boy. Apparently, it might seem, the two were still dating?

And then his daydreams took him elsewhere, somewhere much less pleasant - this very morning. Rose waking up to check her phone, her warm smile when she sees Mickey had sent her a good morning text; the flutter in her stomach at being cared for, loved, thought about. The flutter stirring only deeper as their texts became laced with flirtations, hidden implications that neither need hide from because they were free to be together, free to be loved and both safe in the knowledge that they were. It would explain why she was so engrossed in her phone when she first entered the kitchen, the Doctor not even yet entered her mind this morning. And - judging by the way she was looking at him now with a scowl - now that he _was_ on her mind, it pained him deeply to know that it didn’t bring about the same thoughts of comfort and love she might have had with Mickey.

“What?”

“Why can’t you ever just be nice to Mickey?”

“I’m not _not_ nice to him,” he defended, aware of the fact he sounded like a fourteen-year-old boy. 

Her eyes widened in frustration, so he tried again. “I’ll invite him round for tea next time I make us a pot, ok?”

“Well, you might not need to do that a lot sooner than I’d bet you’d want to,” she smiled wickedly, and he would normally have been thrilled by such smile besides the fact that it involved seeing Mickey Smith. “He called me this morning to tell me there’s something weird going on at Deffry Vale High-”

“-what’s your boyfriend doing hanging 'round a school, isn’t he thirty-eight?”

“First of all, you _know_ he’s only twenty-three, second of all, why are you talking like the older he is the worse it is, when you are _literally centuries_ years old-“

“-what’s _my_ age got to do with anything-“

“-and _third“_ \- she stressed, her cheeks beginning to prickle pink - “he says there’s some weird lights appearing at the school.”

“Sure it’s not just the teachers turning the light switches on and off at the start and the end of their lessons?”

She kicked his leg under the table. He was a fair bit bitter having _not_ heard Rose deny outright that Mickey was still her boyfriend. Why, again? Why were they still together? She never even saw the bloke these days. In fact, last he’d heard they _had_ broken up, back in Cardiff? Had they? His brow furrowed as he flicked through his memories, although the ones containing Micky Smith were few and far between, it had to be said. What with him literally dying for the woman, it was getting quite hard to keep track of the other important men in her life. 

“Fine,” he huffed. “But if it turns out to be nothing, and I’ve wasted a day around a bloody school then I’ll kill him.”

“Think about it like you get to whittle on about physics for an entire day.”

“How’d you work that one out?”

“Well, we gotta blend in somehow,” she shrugged, sipping her tea. “On Earth, it’s kinda weird when adults try to break into schools uninvited. We can be teachers, surely?”

“What would you teach, _'nicking tea and stealing crosswords'?”_

“I reckon I’d do quite well at _'how to tame your alien'.”_

“Is lesson one _'nicking tea and stealing crosswords',_ because if it is then your students are going to fail the exam.”

“Well alright then,” she rolled her eyes. “Lesson one is determining the type of alien you’re handling. Does he have a fancy title and actually is important in maintaining the laws of time, or does he just like to think he is to excuse his dickish behaviour?”

He looked to the ceiling bitterly. “Still haven’t had enough tea to be amicable yet, then?”

She giggled, and it was only because of that sentiment alone that he was able to forgive her. He looked back down at her and she was still smiling, looking down at her cup. He exhaled, comforted at least in the knowledge that he brought about her warmer feelings now.

“Anyway,” she concluded, “do you think it’s worth checking out?”

By her hopeful eyes, the corners of her lips curled upwards in a smile that he bet she liked to believe he thought entirely innocent, but he knew was in fact the smile she wore when she knew she had him wrapped around her little finger, and the way that she was gently tapping his shin with her foot forced him to groan his defeat.

“Fine. We’ll go take a look.”

She stuck her tongue beneath her teeth in a way that assured the Doctor that she knew exactly what she was doing. She finished off her tea and stood, and with one final accidental glance at those legs of hers, he decided he’d had enough of her thinking she was the one in control. Sure, he might need to sit back and be reduced to a jealous teenager when he was supposed to be a bloody Time Lord; and sure, he might need to put aside his personal grudges in the name of keeping the universe in check; and yes, he was indeed thinking about her at any given moment of any given day but that definitely didn't mean she had the upper hand. Lessons on _'how to train your alien'_ she might want, and she very well may think she's going to get something in the same vein, but he was going to get her back somehow. For that, and for making him spend the bloody day with Mickey Smith. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to write School Reunion from the Doctor's perspective, because I find him easier to write (it'll be the angst, that or hundreds of louptagged posts over on Tumblr). Part one is the before, and part two takes place later that evening, after he's invited Mickey on board and the whole wither and die thing, and it was fun to write the Doctor go from so very hopeful to so very hopeless in the space of 5000 words. 
> 
> To be posted tomorrow!


	2. Part two

In hindsight, it was a mistake. Well, it wasn’t; he was losing her, and asking Mickey to stay might just about have been his best shot at making her stay, to show somebody else the stars she fell in love with, before he... well, whatever that was that he did today, whatever exactly it was he said that caused a rift between them so large it would have given the Slitheen a run for their money. And really, he had absolutely no right to be jealous, because it was his own doing. Can’t exactly push someone towards another and then get jealous. Pissed off, yes. Well, no, not that either. 

Essentially, he was being an arse.

And he knew it. And, worse yet: he knew there was no way of fixing it. There really was no going back now; he’d told Rose as much himself. He could, if he wanted to, stop by the lounge and tell her he was sorry, that he takes it back, and that he doesn’t want to lose her. He could tell her that, goodness, he _wants_ to spend the rest of his life with her, that the thought of having her by his side one day and then gone the next was agonising, how she helped him see that there was still goodness and kindness left in the universe following a war so gruelling and that the thought of life after her is _terrifying,_ but at the end of the day that’s all he could do now. Apologise. They wouldn’t get back on track, because the track always ended here. Better they reached it now rather than later. The damage was done.

They’d asked him if he wanted to join them in watching a film, and he momentarily considered it for all of about half a second before the image of the two of them curled up together on the sofa filled his mind and decided that he absolutely did not want to bear witness to that. Which explained his current situation of sitting a few feet under the main control room with no company other than his miserable self. 

Bollocks to it all. To the lot of it: his life, romance, unresolved pasts and complications and domestics and ex-boyfriends and - hold on. _Was_ Mickey an ex? She hadn’t denied it this morning. Oh, Christ - did he just invite her _boyfriend_ along with them? His hearts saturated in dread, and rightfully so. 

A good twenty minutes passed at least, and he’d finally been able to push the thought of Rose and Mickey now sticking their tongues down each other’s throats to the side when he heard her slippers padding into the control room above him. Frankly, he didn’t want to see her tonight. Well, he did, he always did, but he could do with a bit of space from it all. 

“We’re off to bed.”

_Fantastic. Enjoy._

“Doctor?”

“Mmm?” 

She hesitated. Even though she was hidden to him, he could see her messing with the sleeves of his jumper, pulling them down over her hands and folding her arms in tension. He dreaded to think.

“Why did you invite Mickey?”

He sighed, quickly scanning all possibilities of escape before regrettably resigning himself to a conversation he so very much wanted to avoid. “He asked.”

“I asked you not to.”

“Well, then why _didn’t_ you want Mickey to come along?”

She was quiet and he thought for a moment he might have got her before he sighed in annoyance at himself; he didn’t want to ‘get’ her. He didn’t want, in anyway, to hurt her, and yet here they were. He continued to work the set of wires in the hopes that she’d see he was busy and leave him to it. He got so caught up in acting like he was too busy to notice her that he indeed became too busy to notice her sitting on the floor next to him.

“Why are you hiding?” 

He needn’t look at her to know she was irritated, so he kept quiet and only gestured to the wires. 

“Exactly,” she raised her eyebrow. “Hiding." 

He sniffed. “I’m not hiding, Rose. I’m trying to fix these photon accelerators,” he said - quite calmly, considering he could feel his own irritation beginning to flare. This was all just a little bit too human for his liking. He’d spent so long now with just Rose that he was starting to get pissed off at the fact that, not even 8 hours into having another member aboard the TARDIS, they were now bickering about domestics and having conversations based entirely on implications and feelings. He could tell he was about to be in for an exchange that involved reading between the lines and, quite frankly, he’d much rather _not participate in it_. 

She was quiet, and he knew Rose well enough by now that that silence came from her chewing on her bottom lip in an attempt to hold back whatever it was she wanted to say. He knew this particular scenario all too well and he knew he had limited solutions to bringing about optimal result: he could ignore it, and create quite a large problem for himself, or he could ask her what’s wrong - or prompt her to think he _wanted_ to know what was wrong - and create an even larger problem for himself when she finally did tell him. He sighed, looking sadly at the wires before putting down the spanner and wiping his hands on the tea towel. 

“Good film?”

Her eyes met his and she stopped chewing her lip to make room for her sigh, though he was grateful to perceive it wasn’t entirely directed at him. 

“Mickey wanted to watch the next James Bond film,” she moaned. She genuinely did look so bored out of her mind with the idea that he couldn’t help himself from smiling at finally finding a common ground in an air on the brink of hostility. “Honestly don’t get it with those things. I mean, aside from Danial Craig, but I don’t think Mickey’s watching it for him. I don’t even think _he_ likes James Bond, but he was more impressed about watching something that hadn’t even been filmed yet to follow the storyline.”

“Rose wanted to go to the end of the world, Mickey wanted to watch _Quantum of Solace,”_ he chuckled, and even more so when he saw the smile tugging at her reluctant lips. “I always thought you lot would want to go back and see the past.”

“Glad we continue to surprise you.” She’d started to trace the pattern of the grating below her feet, focusing on it, but it caught her off guard and made that smile just that little bit easier to reach. But for some reason all too disappointing, it soon faded. “He told me he wants the future tomorrow.”

“That tends to be what tomorrow brings.”

She scowled and rolled her eyes, and it was quite a bit jarring to feel the sudden shift in her emotions. 

He needed to fix it, he knew that much. And he knew quite often that Rose was not a grand gestures kind of girl. She needed words, but ones that could be validated through emotion and the perceivable. The trouble was words were not his strong suit at all. And even worse: neither were emotions and physical affections. He didn’t particularly want to ask her what was wrong, or try to talk about what had happened - not because he didn’t want to comfort her, certainly not, but because he would be at a loss for words once they started, and he’d make the whole thing bloody worse. As far as he was concerned, that conversation earlier had finished. Done, nothing more to be said, no point opening it back up again and causing more harm. But Rose didn’t see it that way, he only imagined, and for that he truly was remorseful. 

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

She didn’t move, except to keep tracing the patterns of the grating. She did so almost as enticingly as she did this morning, but he couldn’t decide whether it was her frustration or the fact that that daydream of his had become now impossibly out of reach that made her pressure seem less delicate. 

“For what?”

Bugger. 

Now, he knew it stemmed from that conversation outside the cafe, and he knew it was something around Sarah Jane. But he couldn’t even put _his_ finger on why he was frustrated, what exactly had happened between the two of them that lead to this coldness between them, let alone Rose. Well, that’s not strictly true; he knew he was annoyed at himself for so abruptly putting an end to… well, _whatever_ their relationship was on tracks to becoming, in the most selfish and cruel way possible by making her feel shit for being _human_ , but he couldn’t be certain that’s why she was sitting next to him right now. 

“Thought so.” 

It pissed him off, and he became less advanced in concealing his irritation. “Rose, I’m not good at this -”

“Obviously.”

He clenched his jaw in restraint and instead flicked through any possible sentiment she might want to hear, anything that he could take back and apologise for. But he couldn't; he'd meant every word. He _couldn’t_ spend the rest of his life with her, and watching the closest and most important people in your life die in such a painfully long and torturous way really is too difficult to bear thinking about.

“I’m sorry for how it all came out -“

“That’s not it!” 

“Well then, _tell me!”_

“I shouldn’t _have_ to!”

“I’m not a soddin' mind reader, Rose!”

“I’m not _asking_ you to read my mind, I’m asking you to _use common bloody sense!_ Which I realise as I say it that that’s a _stupid_ thing to assume you could do.”

He glared at her; the immaturity she could sometimes demonstrate for someone so mature in so many ways frustrated him beyond belief, if not only for the disappointment. 

“I’m not naive enough to think you haven’t travelled alone for nine hundred years -“

“I never said you were -“

 _“Will you let me finish, for Christ’s sake!”_ she snapped so aggressively that he didn’t think he’d ever heard her be so _angry_.

He stared at the floor, knowing that if he looked at her he would snap, too. She took a moment to recompose herself before she continued.

“You never _talk_. I had to make these assumptions myself - I had no idea how long you were fighting that war for, or what you were doing before then. But what little things you _do_ say told me you’ve been travelling for a long time. You’ve been _alone_ for a long time” - he could see the tears she was trying so desperately to withhold by the way her nostrils flared and her brow creased in anguish now rather than anger - “and, despite what you say, you _aren’t_ happy to be alone for so long. So I knew you’d had other companions before, you just never told me about them. And I thought to myself _‘hey, maybe he doesn’t love to talk about people he’s lost’_ , which is fair. I get that. Wither and die and all that.” She took another moment to recompose; closing her eyes and exhaling deliberately. “But you were _so close_ to her. Holding hands like you do with me, reminiscing about the good old days and again that’s fine. I know I’m nothing special-“

He did finally sigh, rather aggressively, and pushed himself up off the ground. “For God’s sake Rose, if you’re going to start saying stuff like that that you _know_ is just being immature then I’m ending this conversation now.”

_“Sit down!”_

Her voice reverberated around the console room; she didn’t so much as flinch. Instead, she held his gaze, standing her ground firmly. He would have growled in annoyance had she not been so persistent, determined to be heard. He lowered his gaze, and slowly sat back down on the floor. 

She didn’t speak straight away, he thought perhaps now that she finally had him where she wanted him she lost her confidence. He looked back up at her and caught, for just the briefest of moments, a look of utter devastation before her lips tightened in regaining her composure. He couldn’t draw his gaze now even if he wanted to; the fact dawning on him in the most ominous of ways that he hadn’t just hurt her. He’d broken her heart.

“You just left her. Like she didn’t mean anything to you.”

“You don’t know what happened, Rose,” he offered. “You don’t know the full story, why I left or why I didn’t come back.”

“Well, she waited for you,” she said indignantly. “And I don’t know how long she waited, but I think it was long enough that it broke her so much she had to rebuild herself into something new. And she’s _amazing_ , incredible! I could only ever hope to be that amazing one day, but you don’t get it.” Her chin trembled, the first time she faltered as she prepared to say something he only imagined was about to hurt to utter out loud. “To us, you are everything. To you, we’re just… _another_.”

She looked as though she might have finally fallen apart. It was almost unbearable to witness and he considered for a moment doing the only thing he so desperately wanted to do and comfort her, before he realised devastatingly that that wasn’t what she wanted right now. She was determined, and the only thing he could do for her now was to listen. His eyes left hers, whether for his own sake or to help her speak freely he didn’t know. 

“I’m not saying that I’m not special, because I know that I am. But I mean I’m no _different._ That’s what hurts. Knowing that you and this life and all of it is life-changing for me, and will be all-consuming, but for you, you’ll have thousands of years after me to just move on and forget. And that’s _if_ you don’t just leave me behind. I can’t imagine you’d do it deliberately - you might have had every intention to go back for Sarah Jane and I’m sure that if it were me in her shoes you’d have had every intention to come back for me too. But at the end of the day, I just have to live with knowing that there’ll be so many like me after me. It put things into perspective, and it’s just not an easy truth to come to terms with.”

She’d unravelled, said all that she needed to say. And, as expected, they lay at an impasse: he could now no longer listen, and no words could he offer now to make it better; and she’d now unloaded her truth and her pain only to receive no resolve in herself for having done so. 

What a mess. What an awful, sodding mess. He may as well tell her now that she’s no different, that he’ll one day find a way to move on and she’ll become another in a long line as she feared because it might just be about the only form of resolve she might find. 

_Or._ He could, right now, tell her what she meant to him. That yes, maybe she was just another companion, somebody else to share the adventure and the thrill with, and that there will be plenty more after her -as much as he didn’t want there to be. But _goodness_ was he in love with her. He had long since been, and only a little too recently since he was willing to admit it to himself. And if she knew that she was different, if he could reassure her that she was, perhaps it might just heal her yet. 

But it just wouldn’t do her any good, to tell her he loves her only in response to her telling him she feels unloved in a sea of ordinary. She wouldn’t feel it, and he can imagine that all that flirting and superficial sexual pursuit didn’t do much in making her feel selflessly loved to her core. Telling her now wouldn’t mean anything, his words would have an agenda behind them. But if she could _just hold on_ , if he could only find a way to keep her, he could fix this. He could tell her, show her even, how much her existence alone was enough to lay all his future sufferings to rest, how she could stay with him for however long she wanted but she will have always given him forever if only just to have known her, to have heard her laugh and all variations thereof, to know what it feels like to see a smile so genuine and warm. 

She sniffed, a wet one that she used her sleeve to dry. It was then that he noticed she wasn’t wearing his old jumper, for the first time in god only knows how long. Way before he even regenerated, she’d nicked it. Now, though, she was wearing one of her own. 

“Show him something amazing tomorrow, yeah? Let’s impress him.”

And with that, she gathered to her feet and pulled herself up to the main room, her footsteps disappearing into the corridor. 

There was absolutely no fixing this, he sighed, as he felt the loss of something deeper when she left the room. 


End file.
